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by j45 982 days ago
Running it for your own purposes as part of a solution that includes search should be fine under AGPL.

If your product is elastic search built into Postgres as a repackaged and direct competitor to this search plug-in, that’s where my understanding is over the line.
2 comments
allan_s 982 days ago
yes I understand I can do that, and I also understand why the authors chose to do that, I would have done the same.

My point of view is more from a small saas company perspective (i.e 100% pragmatic):

1. I want as less vendor as possible, especially on something as mission critical as my database 2. I already use AWS RDS and it comes with a LOT of nice things (managed, multi-az, easy backup/restore story, etc.)

In that situation:

1. hosting myself is not an option because I will loose all the niceties that I will have to reimplement 2. buying from a 3rd party is not an option either because: 1. What if they go bankrupt ? 2. We are ISO 27001 and they may be not ISO 27001 themselves or forever. 3. If I choose a vendor because it's "postgres + feature A" then if there's an other vendor selling "postgres + feature B" (timescaledb etc.) what do I do ?

That's why I was more interested in knowing if that specific could one day be implemented in postgres directly (as there's already tsvector).

Once again I'm 100% behind them to have chosen a restrictive license if they plan on selling it, but in that case their interested and mine are not aligned, and that's fine.

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j45 977 days ago
That's a really fair use case acknlowedging personal preference to interpret how you like it.

I find some of the built in services on clouds are just open source libraries that are packaged up to increase tie in to that platform.

I like cloud, but cloud agnostically, and hybrid/private clouds in the mix with that seem like a good skill to at least be able to consider thinking through.

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philippemnoel 982 days ago
ParadeDB author here -- correct! We plan to offer a hosted version soon and the idea behind picking AGPL is to be as permissive as possible so that people can use the product for free, but also protect ourselves from abuse in case a large company, say AWS, were to want to ship it in their own environment.

In fact, we went through much questioning wondering to go with ELv2, Apache, AGPL, etc. before settling on AGPL

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j45 977 days ago
Appreciate the response! This would be a great blog post btw.
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